Off Message

by Joel Brouwer

Overview

In fiber-optic-fast meditations on everything from Marxism to the Marianas Trench, Off Message probes the troubling corners of our globalized lives with humor, pathos, and verve. Political without being preachy, contemporary without being cloying, funny without being flip, these poems are unafraid to implicate themselves: like us, their speakers are part of the problem, and their struggles highlight the absurdities of broadband capitalism. What should we think of televised warfare, crackdowns on Twitter, and factory farms? What pages should we take from our history books? Off Message wrestles with questions like these by overlaying the near and the far, the lyric and the encyclopedic. Each poem is a mixtape, an abandoned essay, a satire of modern conscience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935536789
Publisher:	Four Way Books
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

JOEL BROUWER is the author of Exactly What Happened (1999), Centuries (Four Way  Books, 2003), and And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Read an Excerpt

Off Message

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By Joel Brouwer

Four Way Books

Copyright © 2016 Joel Brouwer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935536-78-9

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CHAPTER 1

Lines on Distance

She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned on first the radio and then the tap. The Predator operators of Nellis AFB have as much or more PTSD as pilots who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant I listened to her work to wash events away as quickly as they accumulated. A sort of race. I thought of where the soap was going. Targets glowed on monitors in the base's trailers near Las Vegas, operators in full flight suits drank coffee from paper cups and adjusted altitude, I stroked myself beneath the blankets. I don't like to take chances and haven't been to Vegas in years. The pilots call people who run for cover, black sperm writhing across their screens, "squirters." Near my finish she tugged up the puckered rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should remind you of a time a doctor took hold of your arm for comfort or leverage and tore the bandage off. If nothing like this has happened to you, imagine it. The haberdasher in Diderot who stole his wife's dowry (long story) plans to leave Paris for Geneva, sensing distance will make him less guilty. Was she coming back to bed? She might already have left. Villagers call the drones, which make a buzzing sound, "wasps." The radio reported to an empty room. "An assassin," writes Diderot, "if transported to the shores of China, will lose sight of the corpse he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine." Asia's always such a great place to hide, but Geneva's obviously more convenient. Say she expected her husband to return from duty in a month. Would anything we did between now and then make us any more or less wretched than we were? The drone returns to Bagram without the missiles it left with and a soldier restores its complement. Either his name is Dan or else imagine that. And that a cuckold's rage can snuff a bomb. I came into either a tissue or my fist. This was either weeks or months ago, I can't recall. When de Castañeda and his men clambered down into the Grand Canyon in 1540, they found the boulders which had looked as tall as a man from the rim in fact stood taller than Seville's la Giralda. They must have marveled at distance's power to deceive and to wake deception's twin, oblivion. Their women and homes forgotten. You can't hear the screams from here, but they're there.

The New New Normal

In one of his lives the Buddha came upon a starving tigress about to eat her cubs in desperation and cast his body down a ravine to break it open for the creature to eat. By July the young fox no longer flees as I approach on my morning walk, and is no longer young. I find her scat on the path, black with blackberries. Everyone loves these stories no matter how many times I tell them. No one I know seems too upset about the government collecting our data. It is happening, it has happened, it will happen, it will have happened, again I nod off over my conjugations and learn no new verb. For a long time I've been cycling in samsara, wasting countless lives, sometimes due to excessive desire and sometimes to ignorance. Last night I read a book by a Vietnam POW. Alone for weeks at a time in his cell, he built imaginary houses, board by board, nail by nail. Let's say there is a hell. Do you suppose it gets gradually less hellish, as one year melts into the next? Or does the Devil have some trick to keep the horror eternally fresh? The POW took care not to skip any steps as he worked, and to think about each task for as long as it would take to finish back on earth. I crouch — slowly, slowly — to the turf at the foot of a myrtle; the fox folds her long back legs and sits to face me. He pounded two nails each into five thousand shingles, but when he finished a house, he didn't imagine moving into it, having a party in the backyard, kissing his kids. He started building a new one next door. By the end of the war he had a whole vacant neighborhood in his head. The fox is just at the edge of the woods and could vanish in a flash. But this morning we both want to think on this issue a little, this matter of whether anything happens just once. After his sacrifice the Buddha's family wept at his loss but he wasn't lost! He had been reborn in the celestial realm of Tushita. What did you do during the war? I watched a lot of documentaries and spoke almost exclusively in the subjunctive mood.

Lines Written in Memphis, Tennessee

Defying the prominent signage, I took a picture of the flophouse from the balcony and a picture of the balcony from the flophouse. School group kids with juice boxes. Disgusted because I couldn't make it poignant. A fucking dandelion growing from a cracked brick wall. A thousand clouds. The waiter urged me to select my choices of mini pastries, juices, and hard fruit from the breakfast bar. A man in the paper dreamed of building a new house to replace his old house. He wouldn't tear the old house down, he'd build the new house up inside the old one as it crumbled. Engineers were intrigued. I didn't understand it. My hotel's shadow brawled with the river's flexing pewter currents as I photographed melancholy towboats pushing corn or coal. Swaddling my fancy camera, again ignoring posted rules, I handed dollar bills to every homeless guy who asked. Which did I prefer, dream or mountaintop? I'd seen videos of each at the museum and I said something stupid and true: Both choke me up. But I like best his final speech, for the moment he finishes the "if I had sneezed" litany, allows the laughter — it's such a weird, bathetic passage — then builds a new silence inside the crumbling old silence: "Now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now." He'd die the next day. He knew it would be soon. I'd rushed through most of the museum, ignoring the old pictures and newspapers. I thought I knew everything already. Now now now. The present a pivot. He keeps repeating it. "What are you waiting for?" A girl in a tank top and shimmery orange athletic shorts bicycled by, talking to herself or the Bluetooth rig blinking in her ear, and I thought I knew the other dream of the man in the newspaper was to marry the hooker he'd seen every week for years and have her work for him instead. Why did I think that? That and "melancholy towboats" and the dandelion? Maybe my eye's not right. The homeless guy recited choice selections, even mimicking the cadences. "It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee." I gave him a twenty and took his picture. In the film, you can see Dr. King stumble as he takes his seat, as if something's shoved him. A shadow or current or choice. The girl lay in the grass beside her bike, talking up at the clouds. I took her picture too.

Lines on the Pathetic Fallacy

The hurricane's advance team of breezes administers a poll to my oak trees. The author, having sensed disaster, having been awake for hours, advises his trees not to answer. Telephones trill on nightstands, requiring weary authorities to sit on the edges of their beds with their heads in their hands as demonstrated in disaster movies. The author procrastinates behind his hedge of azaleas, smoking cigarettes to confuse the mosquitoes and drinking beer for no reason I can think of. Hoping the power goes out. His first line will be about how people always for some deep irrational reason hope the power will go out. A cameraman stops his van to ask if he may film my tossing trees. I sweep my arm to grant permission, a sultan bidding concubines to dance. The authorities and author will soon return to CNN, the former to stare terrified into the cameras and the latter to notice the storm on radar resembles a purple ouroboros, a creature distinguished, like the best poems, by both radical autonomy and purposelessness. While the cameraman stalks downed limbs and swamped cars, the author will mask and sharpen the facts, breaking for lunch at noon. The hurricane has its job and I have mine and they're the same: to simulate volition. CNN says the storm wants desperately to move off to the east. My energy bar's wrapper wanted me to try something new today. Three concrete steps on a vacant lot in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward are said to "want to speak," but I've sat with them often and haven't heard a word. The wind is an impatient parent braiding my willow into plaits. Some comedian at AMC has cued up Key Largo. Authorities sound sirens and authors boil hot dogs for lunch, hoping they've neither over- nor underdetermined the cameraman character. What kind of fool would claim to own a tree? The kids across the street have emptied all their souvenir packets of Pat O'Brien's Hurricane Mix into a pitcher of liquor. In such repeated rotations of call and response, there shall we find our comfort. We hope the power goes out. Recite the lines of a favorite film. Don't like the storm, Rocco? Why don't you show the rain your gun? CNN calls to ask the governor whether the hurricane intends to defeat the spirit of the people of the state, and the governor responds that no storm, however malevolent, can defeat the spirit of the people of the state, and the kids raise their pitcher like a flag to show the author and me they've got plenty. Call and response. If the wind doesn't stop, shoot it why don't you. My little maple is revolutionary. Its owner and I defect to the sovereign state of thirsty.

We Seek Heroes; They Fail to Appear or Are False

Is Achilles on the ballot? No. Dead. We'll settle for Hector. Dead. Ajax? Dead. The high school ball fields glow green with fertilizer in the November sun, and the voters' sighs rise from their booths to clutter the gymnasium's rafters. As usual, Circe runs unopposed. We pull the only lever afforded us, drink the drugged cup, hoping some lees of mercy muddy its depths. After intense lobbying the transparency committee approves a series of closed-door hearings. We again agree to bottom from the top. The Mumbai trash picker returns to his village hailed a champion. How tall he stands, how wealthy he must be! He'll build his family a cinderblock hut and everyone will hate him. No one despises the weak more than the slightly weaker. We rush into the library in search of champions and find only shadows, the lucky dead. Odysseus so jealous of Achilles, his death's perfection. Let no man be judged good or happy while he lives — is that Ovid? I know for sure I didn't make that up. All we possess comes from others. Who else is there? Not gods. Maybe wine. Remember that B&B in Philadelphia, decorated with hundreds of old alarm clocks, not one of them working? Our proprietor believed in time not suspended, but ended, and a time beyond that time, unfurling like a blank flag on the grassy sideline. Our horror that someone would use clocks — stopped clocks! — as décor! was of course just for show. We savored our pique like a picnic sweet, maxed out our 501 (c)4, expected great things from the football team.

Personal

I'm clean, suspicious, HWP. You collect old beer cans. You're sick of games. Snow bandages the TGI Fridays and stalls the hulking semis in their steam. God made your face and God don't make no junk. I'm edible just until I flower, like broccoli. You're Mexican and proud. Ice submits to water in its bucket, bi-curious. Lamplight limns the strap-on. This motel doesn't get the same cuckold channel you have at home, you checked. You like fine dining. I'm your chocolate mama. You're weeping. I'm horny. You're not afraid of anything since cancer and seeking same.

Lines on a Photograph of Manadel al-Jamadi

This isn't Manadel al-Jamadi. This is how his face looked after he was alive. Go Google him and you'll see what I mean. Where's the rest of him? The soldier has zoomed too much; we can't say. A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, stood for the whole to be imagined. Al-Jamadi walked into a shower room at Abu Ghraib. For much imaginary work was there. Remember how we argued over having a TV in the bedroom? An hour later, to move the body out of the cellblock without upsetting the prisoners, MPs put an IV in his arm and rushed him out on a stretcher, as if he'd fallen ill. The lacerated face cradled by ice takes on a glassy sheen, as if we're seeing it on an LCD screen, which we are. CIA agent Mark Swanner believed al-Jamadi was just playing possum. Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind. You said something like, Isn't there enough simulacra in here? Casper's Ratio tells us that a body in the open decays twice as fast as one underwater and eight times faster than one buried. We argue in a nice way when we do. We strive to be cordial, like the therapist said to. To see the actual cuts and contusions, you'd have to open up the whole bag and dump out a bunch of ice. For Achilles' image stood his spear. The thumbs-up. That brilliant grin. There's no way to say how many factors affect the speed of decomposition. Our TV flashes ads from its thrift-store plinth. We make compromises all the time. "Yeah, we called him Bernie." Precise terms, recalled in tranquility. His bones probably still exist. Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind. "You see that, Weekend at Bernie's? I don't want to spoil it for you." Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind. "You go rent that and you'll see what I mean."

Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees

The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week BP launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas.

— bp.com, 04.28.2010

Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark. The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ram and represents a single failure point for disconnect. Recommendation: Declare selected points on earth invisible. Affected communities have been provided with limited quantities of powdered milk and other staples. Many questions remain. Some close their eyes under water instinctively. Imagination can create a sense of peril where no real peril exists. Safety equipment tests were necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in question were wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinking into the mud was told to toss his camera to a colleague and hold extremely still. In this sense, we are our own prisoners. Investigators have salt in their hair and sand in their teeth. The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain. Barbecue billboards depict grinning pigs in aprons and toques. Cleanup crews recover thousands of plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do these images appeal to the death drive? Care should be taken to ensure the highest possible reliability from that valve. Thousands in nearby affected communities have been evicted and live in tents. Demonstrators have prevented investigators access to hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World's Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob's BBQ Buffet tells a journalist she last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp "a thousand years ago." Items available only in limited quantities are found in Appendix C. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversity and redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will offer limited foreclosure deferments in affected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snout for air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety's sake. If the committee may offer an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. BP's 2010 Q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million the year before, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However, care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix E. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1917: Diesel found dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators' hotel toilets won't flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich. Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbecue and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may offer an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we've opened there.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Off Message by Joel Brouwer. Copyright © 2016 Joel Brouwer. Excerpted by permission of Four Way Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Lines on Distance 3

The New New Norma! 6

Lines Written in Memphis, Tennessee 8

Lines on the Pathetic Fallacy 11

We Seek Heroes; They Fail to Appear or Are False 14

Personal 16

Lines on a Photograph of Manadel al-Jamadi 17

Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees 19

Memories of the Eurozone 22

Deep Blue vs. Kasparov 24

Bort 27

A Few Lines from the Library 29

Lines on Marriage 31

Some Varieties of Political Activism 34

Observations in a Port City 37

Pantoum after the "Direct Questioning" Method of Interrogation 40

Lines on Sublation 43

How Long Halt Ye Between Two Opinions? 46

Lines on Making Amends 48

Observations at the Security Checkpoint 50

Lines on Waste 53

Memories of the Assembly 54

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world 58

Eclogue in Retrospect 60

Lines Redeveloped in Palmdale, California 62

It's Enough Just to Know 65

El Hombre de Matices 67

Following Ai Weiwei's Twitter Feed after the Sichuan Earthquake 68

Lines on the Narcissism of Minor Differences 71

Lines on the Museum 73

Lines Written in Berlin 77

Marines Land at Mogadishu, 9 December 1992 78

History Isn't a Story 80

Lines on the Kingdom of Ends, Written in Las Vegas 82

Lines on Repressed Memory Syndrome 85

Notes on Torture 87

Avant-Garde Poem 93

Notes

What People are Saying About This

Cathy Park Hong

“. . . a thrilling and masterful book.”

Dana Levin

“Lacerating. Skewering. Anything you can do with a blade Joel Brouwer does in Off Message . . . ”

Juliana Spahr

“It’s a vexed world, and Brouwer is writing equally vexed, yet stunning poems about and for it.”